People Involved

The ASM Asia-Pacific Portal is the result of a series of events, conferences, scoping studies, case studies and further meetings, initiated by two researchers from the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program (RMAP) at the Australian National University (ANU): Dr Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and Dr Colin Filer.

Dr Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt was trained in Geography from the Lady Brabourne College and Calcutta University in India. From 1982, she taught Geography at Masters level in The University of Burdwan in India. Kuntala visited The Australian National University in 2000, and joined the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program as a Community Specialist in Natural Resource Management in 2002. She has been a coordinator and consultant to several international agencies and institutions, including Panos Institute, UK, and the International Atomic Energy Agency writing the Community Perception and Participation in Environmental Restoration Planning technical document for them.

In 1993-94, Kuntala initiated her research on coal mining and the environmental issues in eastern India with funding from Government of India, Ministry of Environment and Forests. This research led to Environmental and Social Impact Studies, including gender roles and status of women in mining. Since then, she has been working continuously on gender, mining and sustainable livelihoods, organising an international workshop and presenting keynote addresses at the International Women and Mining Conference in Visakhapatnam, India in 2004 and at 7th Annual CASM Conference in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in 2007. In 2006, Kuntala began a major research project - Creating Empowered Communities: Gender and Sustainable Livelihoods in a Coal Mining Region in Indonesia - funded by the Australian Research Council in 2006.
See Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt's personal website for more information.

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Dr Colin Filer holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.  He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow and Papua New Guinea, and was Projects Manager for the University of Papua New Guinea’s consulting company from 1991 to 1994, when he left the University to join the PNG National Research Institute as Head of the Social and Environmental Studies Division.  Since 2001, he has been the Convenor of the Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program at the Australian National University’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies.

Colin has been undertaking research on the social context and impact of the mining industry in Melanesia since 1983.  He has been involved, in one way or another, in the assessment, monitoring or evaluation of the social impact of every major mining project which has been developed in PNG since 1970.  He has also played an active role in numerous committees and other bodies established by government and other stakeholders to formulate policies for the mining sector and other resource sectors in PNG.

Colin’s expertise relates primarily to the social mapping of project impact areas (as a form of baseline study), to the assessment, monitoring and evaluation of the local social and economic impacts of large-scale mining projects, to the corporate management of ‘community affairs’, to the formation and impact of government and company policies relating to the compensation of local communities for social and environmental damage, and to the politics of distributing government revenues from large-scale resource development. 

In recent years, Colin has been a member of the Assurance Group for the Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development Project, has played a key role in formulating a sustainable development policy framework for the PNG Department of Mining, has written a report for the Australian Government on the future of the mining and petroleum sectors in the Pacific region as a whole, and has worked on the design and implementation of a number of long-term research projects on key social issues in the mining sector.

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